Saturday, January 5 @ 11:30 AM / Music Box TheatreFROM MORN TO MIDNIGHTDirected by Karlheinz Martin • 1920Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis ScottA bank clerk (Ernst Deutsch) becomes beguiled by a mysterious woman (Erna Morena) and embezzles a large sum from his firm in hopes of sloughing off the oppressive stability of his bourgeois lifestyle. When the woman rejects his entreaties, the clerk descends through the hellhole of modern urban life. Produced shortly after the release of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, this stark adaptation of Georg Kaiser’s Expressionist play was brought to the screen under the supervision of noted German theater director Karlheinz Martin. If anything, From Morn to Midnight makes Caligari look like a bucolic Sunday afternoon stroll through the county fairgrounds. The Dogville of its day, Martin’s film ups the Expressionist ante—the monochromatic sets are sharp and angular, the space is resolutely non-naturalistic, and even the light is painted on. The stylization proved so radical that From Morn to Midnight never received a German theatrical release; Martin’s experiment would be lost to history completely were it not for the film’s anomalous popularity in Japan, where the sole surviving copy was found in 1959. This 2004 restoration from the National Film Archive of Japan and the Munich Filmmuseum reconstructs the original German intertitles and returns this ghastly social critique to the forefront of Weimar cinema. (KW)69 min • Ilag-Film • 35mm from the National Film Archive of JapanCartoon: Felix the Cat in “Whys and Otherwise” (Otto Messmer, 1927) – 7 min – 16mm

Wednesday, January 9 @ 7:30 PM / NEIUCOMPUTER CHESSDirected by Andrew Bujalski • 2013In
a nondescript motel somewhere in Texas, a confluence of computer
programmers, swinging new agers, doomsday spectators, video technicians,
and an unconscionable number of cats have found themselves in the midst
of some very strange happenings. Structured around a chess tournament
played by computers and supervised by a room full of idealistic
professors, tech industry players, and unaffiliated wildcards, Computer Chess
looks to a time in which the utopian dreams of networked technology had
yet to be tainted by VC funds and security state interests. Saddling
his cast with Coke-bottle glasses and overstarched shirts, independent
stalwart Andrew Bujalski revels in the flat, beautifully utilitarian
aesthetics of his milieu, shooting on smeary black-and-white video
courtesy of ancient Sony Portapak cameras that were already well out of
date by the 1980s. Equal parts mockumentary, sports saga, and science
fiction, Computer Chess feels like no other film the American
cinema has recently produced, an unclassifiable brain teaser that
changes shape with every scene. We’re proud to present Bujalski’s
contemporary masterpiece in a format as gloriously unexpected as the
film itself: a 35mm print specially commissioned by the Chicago Film
Society. (CW)91 min • Computer Chess LLC • 35mm from Chicago Film Society Collections, permission Kino LorberShort: Richard Simmons in “Noah Water to Waste” (Golden West Television, 1983) – 9 min – 16mm